Slashdot Mirror
Velociraptor Had Feathers
Spy der Mann writes "A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. A paper describing the discovery, made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science."
http://www.breatheinfo.com/images/big_bird.jpg
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
What was depicted in the movie Jurassic Park was clearly Deinonychus. Velociraptor didn't have that large inner claw. In fact, the name Deinonychus means Terrible Claw while Velociraptor means Speedy Predator. I suspect they misnamed the dinosaur in the movie because the name Raptor was more marketable to children.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Its been suspected for a long time, but what was laking was decent quality fossil evidence. There have been clues before, but the evidence wasn't good enough until now.
the suspicion is that all dinosours had feathers.
Feather are made from the same stuff as scales, chitin (snakes and so on), its just a form of scale thats better suited to temperature regulation. Having feathers did not mean flight was even possible, that would have required specific adaption that feathers would probably have helped, but it would have been some environmental push, not the feathers themselves that caused birds to emerge.
I just can't take a giant feathered dinosaur seriously, even if it is chewing my face off. Just looks like a big fruity lizard with a feather boa, probably going to catch a Broadway show when it's done devouring me.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
and a diet Coke.
No, no... dinosaurs became extinct because they tasted terrible with the Colonel's secret herbs-and-spices recipe. Go back and read Darwin's famous treatise, Oregano on Species , where he proposes the theory that all food evolved from lesser forms of food -- the survival of the tastiest. After all, you don't see chickens, sheep, or beef cattle threatened with extinction, do you?
Clearly this is not a realistic portrayal of the dinosaur. It doesn't have a saddle, and Adam is missing from the picture too.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Your theory is almost correct, in that one could probably say the ostrich is just a small, stupid dinosaur.
If you want something a little more convincing than an ostrich, consider the cassowary; a six-foot tall bird that can run at 30 mph, jump 5 feet high, and swim well, with a 5-inch middle claw on each foot that the bird can and will use as a weapon, disemboweling a human with a single kick. They are intelligent, vicious when threatened, and cunning enough to outflank organized groups of humans they perceive as a threat.
Fortunately, they aren't carnivores.
See, in the article it mentions briefly before getting to the feather part that the Veliciraptor may be smaller than originally thought. Then it goes on about how this guy found bumps on the arm bone that correspond to bumps on the same bone in birds. Alright. But then it mentions that the bumps have never been found on any Velociraptor bones before.
My question: Why is the conclusion that Velociraptor had feathers and not that they've discovered a different species?
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Neitzsche
Well, if you look at nodern carnivores, you see such examples as:
- the fox, which is pretty darn red
- the tiger, which is relatively bright orange and with stripes too (and cats somewhat inherited that: a normal tabby male is almost always orange, though the females are nearly always grey when they're tabby.)
In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
A hypothesis there is that camouflage doesn't always mean having the same colour as the surroundings. Three quarters of camouflage in the animal world seems to have to do more with the mental capacity of your opponent (prey or predator, as the case may be) than with blending in.
Primates have very evolved, arguably top-of-the-line image analysis and recognition capabilities. A lot of more primitive animals don't. For example, strange as it may seem to you, a lot of animals have trouble recognizing a snake as a snake. (In fact, one hypothesis is that a lot of the natural selection pressure for increasingly bigger brains in primates was... snake recognition.) A lot take "shortcuts" to save neurons, like mainly processing edges instead of whole shapes, or mainly seeing stuff that moves instead of analyzing the whole picture. A lot are nearly colour-blind, or have other primary colours for their vision than humans have. Some species (e.g., a lot of birds) don't even try to recognize another animal as a whole, but just look at where the eyes are: both in front for stereoscopic vision means predator, eyes on the sides means harmless herbivore. Etc.
So basically don't assume that what's piss-poor camouflage for _you_, also counts as such for another species. It may be actually _excellent_ camouflage in the environment that animal has to deal with.
E.g., lots of stripes and dots may look like begging for attention to you, but may severely overload the edge detection in more primitive species, by creating lots and lots and lots of extra edges, and thus prevent them from figuring out the whole.
E.g., the reason a lot of exotic fish are orange, yellow and red, is because those frequencies get absorbe the fastest in water. If you go deep enough, pretty much all available light is... blue. So you don't really need to colour yourself black, you only need to absorb blue. A simpler and cheaper to produce pigment can serve the same purpose and achieve the same effect.
E.g., a big tail like that of the pheasant may look like an unexplainable handicap, until you realize that most animals have a very simplified way of judging how big an opponent is. They only judge how big the image looks, not try to reconstruct the 3D animal in their brain and judge the size that way. There's a reason cats puff up and turn sideways when they might need to fight. To _you_ it's the same cat turned sideways, but to more simple-brained animals (apparently including other cats) it just became a lot larger and thus more dangerous. Or to the same animal you might look like a lot of an easier prey if you crouch or sit than if you stand up. So, depending on what predators it had to evolve with, being able to fan a giant tail can actually act as a deterrent.
So basically, we probably can't extrapolate what the raptors' plumage looked like. It probably depends a lot on the environment, and on how their prey's brain worked. And given the many millions of years involved, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed over time as their environment and prey evolved.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Picture of one of these little bastards attacking:
http://www.robotbreeder.com/Robotblogger/uploaded_images/cassowary-attack-2-753549.jpg
Wow.
It was used in WWII. No real evidence it worked well, but the principle applies to predators. Who is going to miss a big galumphing thing charging towards them, no matter how well camouflaged? That's not the point. The point is to make the prey misjudge distance, direction, and speed, so that when you leap, they dodge the wrong way.
Humans use the same kind of visual shortcuts that other animals do. In fact, it's in the basic structure of the eye. The rods and cones in the eye are cross linked and inhibit each other, meaning that only large changes between adjacent cells are transmitted by the optic nerve. The brain then rebuilds a complete picture based on the edge and tone information transmitted.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton